Synopsis: The overall goal for the IR&D Program is to help position the Laboratory to make critical contributions to critical challenges in current and planned business areas through research and development. The Hart Prizes were established to recognize significant contributions to the Laboratory's IR&D Program. This colloquium features the three IR&D Projects recently selected in 2009 to receive the Hart Prizes for excellence in research and development for FY2008. Research: Information Fusion and Localization in Distributed Sensor Systems - The goal of this multi-year IR&D project is to address unique challenges in information processing, information fusion, and resource optimization for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN) used to detect the presence (or arrival) of target objects in the area covered by the WSN (also called distributed sensor network or a sensor field). - APL Investigators: I-Jeng Wang, Dennis G. Lucarelli, Philippe M. Burlina, Daniel F. DeMenthon, Anshu Saksena, and Anne A. Jorstad. Research: Exploitation of Synthetic Aperture Radar Data Products - The extent to which SAR data contains information about a moving object that can be exploited has not been well understood. In particular, information on the time history of the moving object (position, velocity and higher moments (e.g. acceleration, jerk, …) could be very useful for various image analysis applications and were studied in this project. - APL Investigators: Chad M. Hawes, Rickey D. Chapman, Michael E. Nord, E. David Jansing, and Gregory S. Avicola. Development: Environmental Changes on Biological Aerosol Particles – This project developed procedures to examine the atmospheric processes that affect the physical, chemical and biological properties of airborne microorganisms. This will allow us to understand the background of biological aerosols in the environment, the fate of biological aerosols intentionally released into the environment and the potential respiratory transmission of some diseases. - APL Investigators: Joshua L. Santarpia, Shanna A. Ratnesar-Shumate, Kelly M. Brinkley, Jason J. Quizon, Nathan A. Hagan, Plamen A. Demirev, Albert J. Paul Jr., Evan P. Thrush, Thomas J. Buckley, Miquel D. Antoine, Neal A. Baker, George Murray, and David A. Kitchin.